Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Why websites are so important

After I wrote last week about the problem with architects' websites, somebody pointed me to the appropriately named Websites for Architects. Set up by Australian architectural photographer Nic Granleese and written in a week, it functions in the form of a 'bootcamp'. You sign up and it pushes a chapter at you each day. I haven't read it all yet, but I like the sentence from his first chapter: 'It's not the editors of magazines holding you back because in many ways you are now the editor.' Granleese's point is that the amount of content generated online vastly exceeds printed content, and that bloggers and tweeters are looking for established content that they can plunder or link to. 'If you are not providing the core content then you won't exist online,' Granleese says.
And existing online is crucially important for architects. Work opportunities come to those who are known, and when competing for work familiar names will have a natural advantage. Architects just cannot afford not to have decent websites. After I wrote last week's post, variously people kindly pointed out the sites that they thought were the very worst offenders. There are some sites that are worse than I could possibly have imagined - talented architects whose imagination fails them when they come to think about their websites. True there are one or two practices that are already so famous and successful that they don't have to bother. But they really are just a handful. Everyone else should have a good look at their site, be dispassionate and, if it isn't working, do something about it now.